Close Relations
Page 36
On the green, the kids were playing football. Their yells drifted through the open door of the General Stores, where Eric was serving a customer four portions of his salmon and spinach roulade. The shop was thriving because the inhabitants of Wingham Wallace were busy, achieving people; they commuted to London, they worked in PR, they had Agas but no time to cook in them and so they flocked to the shop, where they purchased Eric’s delicacies and served them at dinner parties, passing them off as their own, or ate them, exhausted, in front of the TV and washed them down with one of his New World sauvignons, for he had an excellent stock of wine. At last they had a shop which understood them, they said.
Dorothy was selling stamps to the new occupant of Louise’s house, a woman to whom she had taken an instant dislike. The woman asked: ‘Tell me, did your daughter have any trouble with rabbits?’
‘Rabbits?’ asked Dorothy, giving her some change.
‘We’re simply overrun with the things. Had the garden done, cost a fortune, and they’re eating it down to the ground.’
‘As I remember, she did have a troublesome buck,’ replied Dorothy, ‘but God knows what happened to him.’
It was dark when Prudence finished the manuscript. Supper was over. Aziz had lit the fire and the others were sprawled around the living room watching TV.
‘. . . So the three sisters lived happily ever after. Or so they thought, for they didn’t realise that this was just the beginning.’
She laid down the last page. Maddy looked up. ‘What’s that you’ve been reading?’
‘Erin’s new novel.’
‘Is it any good?’
Prudence shrugged. She got to her feet and went over to the fireplace. She fed the manuscript, page by page, into the fire. The flames leaped, illuminating her sisters’ faces as they turned, briefly, to watch. Then they turned back to the TV. Monty, lying on the hearthrug, thumped his tail.
Read on for the first chapter of Deborah Moggach’s brilliant new novel Something to Hide
Pimlico, London
I’ll tell you how the last one ended. I was watching the news and eating supper off a tray. There was an item about a methane explosion, somewhere in Lincolnshire. A barn full of cows had blown up, killing several animals and injuring a stockman. It’s the farting, apparently.
I missed someone with me to laugh at this. To laugh, and shake our heads about factory farming. To share the bottle of wine I was steadily emptying. I wondered if Alan would ever move in. This was hard to imagine. What did he feel about factory farming? I hadn’t a clue.
And then, there he was. On the TV screen. A reporter was standing outside the Eurostar terminal, something about an incident in the tunnel. Passengers were milling around behind him. Amongst them was Alan.
He was with a woman. Just a glimpse and he was gone.
I’m off to see me bruv down in Somerset. Look after yourself, love, see you Tuesday.
Just a glimpse but I checked later, on iPlayer. I reran the news and stopped it at that moment. Alan turning towards the woman and mouthing something at her. She was young, needless to say, much younger than me, and wearing a red padded jacket. Chavvy, his sort. Her stilled face, eyebrows raised. Then they were gone, swallowed up in the crowd.
See you Tuesday and I’ll get that plastering done by the end of the week.
Don’t fuck the help. For when it ends, and it will, you’ll find yourself staring at a half-plastered wall with wires dangling like entrails and a heap of rubble in the corner. And he nicked my power drill.
Before him, and the others, I was married. I have two grown-up children but they live in Melbourne and Seattle, as far away as they could go. Of course there’s scar tissue but I miss them with a physical pain of which they are hopefully unaware. Neediness is even more unattractive in the old than in the young. Their father has long since remarried. He has a corporate Japanese wife who thinks I’m a flake. Neurotic, needy, borderline alcoholic. I can see it in the swing of her shiny black hair. For obvious reasons, I keep my disastrous love-life to myself.
I’m thinking of buying a dog. It would gaze at me moistly, its eyes filled with unconditional love. This is what lonely women long for, as they turn sixty. I would die with my arms around a cocker spaniel, there are worse ways to go.
Three months have passed and Alan is a distant humiliation. I need to find another builder to finish off the work in the basement, then I can re-let it, but I’m seized with paralysis and can’t bring myself to go down the stairs. I lived in it when I was young, you see, and just arrived in London. Years later I bought the house, and tenants downstairs have come and gone, but now the flat has been stripped bare those early years are suddenly vivid. I can remember it like yesterday, the tights drying in front of the gas fire, the sex and smoking, the laughter. To descend now into that chilly tomb, with its dust and debris – I don’t have the energy.
Now I sound like a depressive but I’m not. I’m just a woman longing for love. I’m tired of being put in the back seat of the car when I go out with a couple. I’m tired of internet dates with balding men who talk about golf – golf. I’m tired of coming home to silent rooms, everything as I left it, the Marie Celeste of the solitary female. Was Alan the last man I shall ever lie with, naked in my arms?
This is how I am, at this moment. Darkness has fallen. In the windows of the flats opposite, faces are illuminated by their laptops. I have the feeling that we are all fixed here, at this point in time, as motionless as the Bonnard lady in the print on my wall. Something must jolt me out of this stupor, it’s too pathetic for words. In front of me is a bowl of Bombay mix; I’ve worked my way through it. Nothing’s left but the peanuts, my least favourite.
I want to stand in the street and howl at the moon.
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Copyright © Deborah Moggach 1997
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First published in the United Kingdom in 1997 by William Heinemann
Published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by Vintage Books
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library